Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / AUGUST 2023
Kately Towsley
USA
www.katelytowsley-art.com
About
Kately Towsley makes work about the human experience.
Engaging with topics of memory, faith, and social justice,
she is interested in people's stories. Towsley views art as an
avenue of connection, both introspectively and communally.
Her work aims to share personal contemplations while
provoking the viewer’s own thoughts, experiences,
knowledge, or lack thereof on a subject. She often favors
methods that are detail-oriented, tedious, and involved in
order to imbue the work with a greater sense of intention
and presence. Working conceptually, the subject matter she
chooses to explore informs the disciplines, materials and
media she uses to create a work. Towsley makes in response
to questions she has, musings, reflections, convictions,
or the realization that she does not know enough about a
critical history, or current event. At times Towsley's work is an
intense investigation in order to educate and commemorate,
at others an effort to produce beauty and make something
tangible with her hands.
Luontosuhde
My time at Arteles feels like a return to some long-forgotten
haven. Here, I am gifted freedom from the usual strains and
worries of life, and time to simply be. Time to grow, to rest,
and to create. Along with several ongoing experiments, I
completed two works at Arteles. One, a diaristic book work
involving the pairing of linocut prints and prose. Daily, I would
choose imagery and words of significance to me in order to
process my thoughts and catalogue my month-long journey.
The second work, made in collaboration with the nature I
was so inspired by, involves installation and performance.
‘Luontosuhde’ is a Finnish word that describes our connection
to the land, to the earth. When I contemplate the space of
safety and development that is Arteles, I can’t help but call to
mind the womb: a sacred place of protection and growth, one
in which we exist in-between worlds and our sole purpose is
to be and to grow. The installation includes a cyanotype that
aesthetically alludes to ultrasound imagery. Projected on the
walls is video from the hours-long process of composing and
exposing the cyanotype outdoors before, during, and after a
morning’s dawn. Encircling the cyanotype of my body, a trail
of forest limbs and plants weave throughout the building, out
the back door, and into our metsä: an umbilical cord to the
land, the land which births and sustains us all.